Kyle Chown

What Were the Key Events in the Development of Civil Rights

for African Americans?
Many significant changes occurred in the area of African American civil rights
after the American civil war. These can be split into several groups, such as legal,
political and social.
In the area of politics, it would seem that several important changes occur
relatively quickly. From 1865 to 1870, the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments are
passed, freeing African Americans from slavery, making them American citizens
and giving them the right to vote respectively. On examination however, these
amendments to the constitution affected little. Despite being free American
citizens, many were forced in to labour contracts or arrested for vagrancy as a
result of not having a job. The 15th amendment was similarly ineffective, as,
while it did give the right to vote to any citizen regardless of race, many other
restrictions could be put in place to stop African Americans from voting.
It is only much later that a change is seen in the political position of African
Americans. The first comparatively small improvement occurred in 1948, when
the US armed forces were desegregated. It was 16 years after this that the Civil
Rights Act was introduced, being followed by the Voting Rights Act the next year.
These signified an enormous change in the civil rights of African Americans,
banning public segregation laws and removing arbitrary restrictions on who is
allowed to vote. These changes allowed some African Americans to get better
jobs, due to them no longer being segregated. Another factor that could be
considered political was the implementation of affirmative action, put in place by
several executive orders. This meant that the government would actively
encourage businesses of a certain size and linked to the government to take
affirmative action in hiring minorities. This helped significantly, not just by
opening up jobs for African Americans but by clearly showing the governments
changing stance on civil rights. Overall, the political status of African Americans
changed dramatically, with them going from being massively discriminated
against, whether through job restrictions, segregation or voting, to being proper
citizens almost on par with any other.
There are two incredibly important legal cases concerning African Americans.
The first was the Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. The most
important legal point about this case was that it set a legal precedent for African
Americans being treated as separate but equal. This remained true for decades,
being used to justify everything from segregation to the large difference in
funding given to White and Black schools, despite this obviously not being
equal. This changed, however, in 1954, during the Brown v. Board of Education
court case, which declared that the laws segregating school children were
unconstitutional. Whilst this ruling was not often followed, it effectively reversed
the ruling of the previously mentioned case, being used as a precedent when
further instances of segregation, such as segregation on buses, were deemed
unconstitutional. It can be said that, because of this ruling, that the legal position
of improved greatly, as it signified an incredible change in what was and wasnt

Kyle Chown
deemed constitutional, and therefore paved the way for many further positive
developments.
Whereas the previous two areas are clearly improvements, the area concerning
the actions of African Americans themselves is more debatable. In the early part
of the period, African Americans already had a hand in the struggle for their civil
rights. The aforementioned Plessy V. Ferguson case is an example of a man
deemed legally Black deliberately breaking the law segregating train cars in
order to argue against those laws in court. The NAACP was also formed in 1909,
immediately focusing on ending segregation, specifically the Jim Crow laws. Both
of these are examples of African Americans actively fighting for their civil rights
as American citizens. This attitude continues in to 1955, with the African
Americans community banding together to boycott Montgomery buses, causing
the law to eventually be deemed unconstitutional. Whilst these incidents would
indicate that African Americans worked together to achieve their goals, seeing
themselves as a single united group, this starts to break down during the 1970s.
By this point, many African Americans had worked their way up to becoming
middle class. When large suburbs were developed, they swiftly moved in to
them, leaving behind the poorer African Americans in the rundown inner cities. It
is important to note, however, that these middle-class African Americans were
not moving in to the same areas as Whites, but in to areas that had often been
vacated by White Americans previously. Despite that, this caused African
Americans to stop forming a single race identity and to instead form two. This
didnt help the movement towards improved civil rights as those African
Americans that were in the suburbs begun to stop sympathising with others of
their race, weakening the strength of African Americans as a political force.
One particular factor with debate over how effective it was at advancing civil
rights is the Black Power movement. Often viewed as inherently antagonistic, the
Black Power movement was often characterised as pushing for Black separatism.
Individuals such as Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X were particularly good at
rallying others to their cause. This could be seen as a positive effect, as it caused
some African Americans to take a firmer stance against oppression, however it
could also be seen as a negative, as it further splintered the civil rights
movement in to strictly non-violent activists and those that believed in selfdefence. It is possible to portray this in a more favourable light, as, when
compared to other more radical activists, the less aggressive campaigners were
seen in a much better light and thus were taken more seriously. The actions of
African Americans did change their civil rights immensely, with the Montgomery
bus boycott proving how effective those actions could be, however towards the
end of the period their effectiveness became much weaker, with African
Americans splintering in to ever smaller groups, diluting their power.